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Sunday, November 11, 2007

For some reason, both of the bamboo palms (Chamaedorea seifrizii) at work have flowered recently. Maybe they do this every year and I just never noticed when I was a customer. Maybe it's special. Don't know. But in any event, it was my first time to see these particular flowers, so I took pictures, which I pass on to you.

The first two pictures, in particular, are clearer if you click on them to enlarge.

The overall situation.

Closer view.

Close-up.

These are only pictures of one of the two plants; the other one is in a less photographable spot. The only big difference between the two of them is that the color of the seeds, or pods, or whatever those things are, on the other, is roughly the color of blueberries.

I'm not sure if one being purplish-blue and the other being bluish-green (the stalks are bright orange in both cases) means that one is fertile and the other isn't, or if it's just an artifact of the different care they got (purple-blue gets less light, and was less hot this summer, and probably also gets watered more often).

The purple-blue one also dropped a lot of fronds recently, which the books tell me is normal, and thought to be the plant's way of making it easier for pollinators to get to the flower. The blue-green one has so far held on to all its fronds, which might mean it has more faith in the pollinators.

EDITED: Changed Chamaedorea erumpens to Chamaedorea seifrizii, which appears to be the more dominant name for this species.

Just so you know:

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Have questions about PATSP? See the Infrequently Asked Questions post, or ask directly by e-mail. To e-mail, remove the two "d"s from the below address:

mrsubdjunctive@doutlook.com

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Ass-covering legal disclaimer that should really be perfectly obvious to anybody reading this anyway

The thoughts, opinions, life choices, etc. discussed in this blog are those of its author, and are not necessarily endorsed by his former employer, nor were they ever necessarily endorsed by his former employer before she was former. In fact, I'm pretty sure we disagreed about a lot of stuff, which was additional incentive not to discuss anything that didn't relate pretty directly to plants. And as far as it goes, we disagreed about a fair amount of stuff directly relating to plants, too.

In any case. Nothing in this blog should be taken to represent my former employer's views on anything, except for the few things explicitly identified as her opinions, and even then it's possible I've misunderstood or exaggerated what her actual views were. So if you want to know what she thinks about stuff you should just ask her.